UC Berkeley Point of View

This article originally appeared in the May 21 edition
of the Chronicle of Higher Education. William
Kidder is a researcher and Susan Kiyomi Serrano is the
research director
at the Equal
Justice Society. Both are Cal alums. Angelo
N. Ancheta is the legal director for the Civil Rights Project
at Harvard University.

When John J. Moores, the chairman of the University of
California Board of Regents, released a report last fall
and told the news media that the Berkeley campus might
be using race as an "unstated factor" in violation
of Proposition 209, the state ban on race-conscious admissions,
he ignited a firestorm of controversy that continues to
rage.

In March, after Moores wrote an article in Forbes magazine
elaborating on his views that the university system was "discriminating
so blatantly against Asians," a majority of the regents
voted to distance themselves from him and to support the
system's admissions policies. Several weeks later a special
committee of UC representatives, including Moores, established
largely to respond to his allegations, released a study
that left unresolved whether the system was favoring black
and Latino applicants, in violation of state law. Moores
is expected to release the final version of his own report
on Berkeley admissions this summer.

Moores's focus on Asian-American students is just the
latest foray in his crusade to dismantle the University
of California's "comprehensive review" admissions
process, by which all applicants are evaluated not only
on test scores and grades, but also on leadership, motivation,
and achievement in light of their experiences and circumstances
-- like low-income or refugee status, or being the first
in one's family to attend college. Yet his misguided battle
against comprehensive review promises to hurt the opportunities
of all minority applicants, including Asian-American students.
What's more, as colleges around the United States carefully
study race-neutral-admissions approaches in the wake of
the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, his criticisms
are highly misleading.

The legal scholar Sumi Cho has used the term "racial
mascotting" to describe the process by which opponents
of diversity often shrewdly, and inappropriately, champion
the interests of Asian-American people to lend their own
political agenda a greater aura of legitimacy. Why is Moores's
incendiary allegation that Berkeley is discriminating against
Asian-American students so disingenuous? The linchpin of
his analysis is that a disproportionate number of the 359
students who were admitted last year with SAT scores below
1000 were underrepresented minority students, and that
those students are displacing better qualified applicants,
often Asian-Americans, with higher SAT scores.

That argument ignores the rigor of the University of California's
admissions procedures in general and the comprehensive-review
process in particular. Overall, the calculations are designed
to make only about 12.5 percent of the graduates of state
high schools eligible for admission to the university.
And usually the students in each high school who attend
are those who have completed a prescribed curriculum and
either have graduated in the top 4 percent of their class
or have obtained a requisite combination of test scores
and grades.

Moreover, the students who were admitted with SAT scores
below 1000 represent only about 3 percent of Berkeley's
nearly 11,000 admission offers, and 99 of those admits,
or about 28 percent, were Asian-American. Students who
are Asian-American are actually doing quite well in the
university system and at Berkeley in particular. For California
students in Berkeley's 2003 admissions cycle, 38 percent
of the applicants, 39 percent of the students who were
admitted, and 46 percent of the students who enrolled were
Asian-American.

Since November, admissions officers and data experts in
the university president's office have been studying undergraduate-admissions
statistics. Their research was released in preliminary
form in March and included in the recent committee report.
They found, in fact, that the admission rate of Asian-American
students at Berkeley in 2003 was slightly higher than that
of white students and substantially higher than that of
African-American students and Latino students. What grabbed
headlines, however, was that their predicted-admission
model forecast a slightly higher admission rate for Asian-American
students at Berkeley than the actual admission rate: 33.9
percent versus 32.2 percent. Moores has cited the study
as evidence that comprehensive review is discriminatory.

But those preliminary findings are misleading because
the study did not control for the factors at the heart
of comprehensive review: achievement relative to the opportunities
available in students' high schools and home environments.
Buried near the end of the committee's report is this important
caveat: "hypothetically, if Asian-American applicants
have better opportunities, on average, than African-American
applicants, a statistical model that doesn't account for
this may overpredict the number of Asian-American students
who would be admitted." By the end of the year, the
researchers plan to analyze Berkeley admissions more thoroughly,
using more sophisticated statistical modeling and evaluating
individual applicant files. Even if those researchers continue
to find minor, unexplained differences in admissions rates,
the comprehensive-review approach should not be viewed
as the problem but, rather, as part of the solution. It
represents a modest race-neutral effort to deal with the
staggering inequalities, based on race and class, that
prevail among California youth.

Just before the implementation of comprehensive review,
Isaac Martin, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of
California Institute for Labor and Employment; Jerome Karabel,
a Berkeley sociologist and Rockridge Institute senior fellow;
and Sean W. Jaquez, a Los Angeles lawyer, studied 1999
admission rates to the University of California system
at nearly 1,100 California high schools. They found, for
instance, that from Arcadia High, a school near Los Angeles
composed largely of white and Asian-American upper-middle-class
students, 370 students were admitted -- nearly twice as
many as from the bottom 50 high schools, defined as those
with the lowest percentage of graduates admitted, combined.
Washington High, a predominantly Latino school in Fresno,
sent no graduates.

Even those statistics fail to capture the full story.
For instance, John F. Kennedy High, a primarily African-American
school in Richmond, a few miles north of Berkeley, had
only five graduates admitted. The next spring, the civil-rights
groups filing Williams v. State of California, a case challenging
the legality of basic conditions and resources in California
schools, revealed that AP physics, AP English, geometry,
and algebra were all taught at Kennedy by a series of substitute
teachers for the entire school year.

Although the state's high-school students come from increasingly
diverse backgrounds, the proportion of California freshmen
at Berkeley who were black, Latino, and American Indian
was still 35 percent lower in 2003 than in 1995, the year
before Proposition 209 was passed. Comprehensive review
offers hope for a better way of life not only for those
students, but also for Hmong students whose parents are
farm workers in the Central Valley, and for Vietnamese-American
students in the inner city whose parents toil in low-wage
service jobs. Various studies, including a forthcoming
one by Jesse M. Rothstein, an economist at Princeton University,
have concluded that SAT scores correlate much more with
students' socioeconomic status and background than with
their high-school or college grades. In fact, nearly four-fifths
of those admitted to Berkeley with SAT's under 1000 come
from families in which neither parent attended college.

Moores claims that Berkeley is really "victimizing" students
with low SAT scores who "can't compete." But
the Berkeley students with SAT scores under 1000 are extremely
high achievers in areas like leadership and community service,
and half of them rank in the top 4 percent of their high-school
classes.

Moreover, research also shows that SAT scores are weak
predictors of college grades and graduation rates. The
Equal Justice Society, where two of us work, along with
other civil-rights groups and faculty members at Berkeley,
released a report last fall documenting that Berkeley students
with 900s on the SAT graduated 79 percent of the time,
students with SAT's in the 1400s graduated 86 percent of
the time, and even those small differences were again attributable
to socioeconomic barriers rather than SAT scores. In the
UC system, high-school grades explain a modest 15 percent
of the differences in freshman grades, and adding the SAT
boosts this to only 21 percent. Moores is at least partly
correct when he says that "the path into UC is pretty
straightforward: Work hard, take demanding courses, and
demonstrate academic success." Regrettably, Moores
profoundly misunderstands how his attack on comprehensive
review sends the opposite message to California's youth
as well as to its policy makers.

His Ahab-like obsession with a small proportion of Berkeley
students with modest SAT scores is doing serious damage
to the University of California, which is foundering in
the midst of a "perfect storm" of unprecedented
enrollment cuts, steep tuition hikes, decreased financial
aid for low-income students, and the threatened demise
of outreach programs. As chairman of the regents, Moores
should wield considerable influence in shaping the system's
budget. Yet, regarding Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal
to eliminate all support for the university's outreach
programs to disadvantaged students, Moores chillingly declared,
as reported in the San Diego Union-Tribune: "I can't
imagine a better program for him to eliminate."

Under the governor's proposed budget, freshman enrollments
at the University of California and the California State
University systems will be cut by 10 percent even as the
number of high-school graduates swells. As a result, in
April thousands of applicants who were eligible to attend
UC, including 1,800 Asian-American students who would normally
be admitted to at least one UC campus, were turned away
and told to come back as community-college transfers. Regent
Moores's irresponsible statements during university budgetary
crises stand out as a far more troublesome threat to opportunity
for all applicants, including Asian-American students,
than comprehensive review.